Shame on President Joko Widodo: Herald Sun editorial

PRESIDENT Joko Widodo as good as pulled the trigger on Bali Nine drug smugglers Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan.

Indonesia's President Joko Widodo (C) delivers his closing statement during the closing ceremony of the Asian African Conference in Jakarta on April 23, 2015. Asian and African leaders have gathered in Indonesia this week to mark 60 years since a landmark conference that helped forge a common identity among emerging states, but analysts say big-power rivalries will overshadow proclamations of solidarity. AFP PHOTO / ROMEO GACAD

PRESIDENT Joko Widodo as good as pulled the trigger on Bali Nine drug smugglers Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan.

By refusing to spare two men who had turned their lives around in the past 10 years, he may as well have taken his place alongside the soldiers who shot them.

Their lives were snatched in a volley of rifle fire in the darkness outside the prison on the execution island of Nusakambangan.

Six others died with them in a mass execution, each in front of separate firing squads of 12 soldiers.

Nothing has been achieved by their deaths. Sukumaran became a talented artist under the tutelage of Archibald Prize winner Ben Quilty, who visited him in prison.

Chan became an ordained pastor, gave comfort to other prisoners and was married to his sweetheart the day before he died.

Bali Nine pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed overnight

The bodies will be washed clean before they are given to their families to bring home. But it is President Widodo who is left with their blood on his hands.

Indonesian attitudes to the death penalty are changing. No one who saw the pain etched on the faces of the families of these men could not be affected by their grief. The death penalty has no place in society.

They were guilty, but better they were kept in jail. President Widodo must carry the burden of blame for a waste of life that has served no purpose. He has displayed weakness, not strength.

He could have shown courage, by declaring even in the hours before their deaths that he would grant clemency. Instead, he has shamed the millions of Indonesians who elected him.

President Widodo came to power from the Indonesian provinces on a platform of anti-corruption, yet refused to consider corruption allegations made against the judges in the trial of Sukumaran and Chan.

It is unthinkable that these executions went ahead when there were still legal avenues to be pursued. Only the day before, the Indonesian Constitutional Court declared its preparedness to open a hearing on May 12 into President Widodo’s refusal to consider the circumstances under which he might grant clemency.

What good is a decision that might have at least asked him to reconsider his refusal to grant mercy when these men are now dead?

The same might be said of the Judicial Court investigation into the alleged demands of the trial judges for more than a billion rupiah, the equivalent in Australian dollars of some $130,000, to overturn a demand by the Attorney-General for the death sentence.

It will take months before the court will make its finding, if it ever does.

There will be consequences. The relationship between Australia and its biggest neighbour will be strained for many years.

Its President will never be thought of as anything other than a man who refused to show mercy, no matter that world and religious leaders begged him to do so.

Did he simply tire of listening to the entreaties of Prime Minister Tony Abbott? He stopped taking his phone calls.

The fate of two men who had shown they were sincerely rehabilitated by the time they had spent in an Indonesian jail seemed not to concern him.

He was implacable, immovable and so bloody determined to see them put to death.

A stroke of his pen would have set Indonesia on a different path.